The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota

By Clay Jenkinson

North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world's largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation's mos

• Language: English
• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Release date: Jun 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646631001

Clay Jenkinson

Clay Jenkinson is a nationally respected Jefferson scholar whose previous books include The Paradox of Thomas Jefferson and Message on the Wind. He is scholar in residence at Lewis and Clark College and a senior fellow of the Center for Digital Government. He lives in Reno, Nevada.

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The Language of

Cottonwoods

Essays on the Future of

North Dakota

Clay Jenkinson

The Language of Cottonwoods

Essays on the Future of North Dakota

By Clay Jenkinson

© Copyright 2021 Clay Jenkinson

ISBN 978-1-64663-100-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover painting used with permission by Katrina Case.

Maps and illustrations by Joanna Walitalo.

Photographs by Clay Jenkinson.

Cover design by Skyler Kratofil.

Published by

3705 Shore Drive

Virginia Beach, VA 23455

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www.koehlerbooks.com

Also by Clay Jenkinson

Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains

A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota

The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness

A Free and Hardy Life: Theodore Roosevelt’s Sojourn in the American West

For the Love of North Dakota: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune

Repairing Jefferson’s America: A Guide to Civility and Enlightened Citizenship

Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena (with Char Miller)

Donald Trump and the Death of American Integrity: An Autopsy and a Path Forward

Bring Out Your Dead: The Literature and History of Epidemics

For Catherine Missouri Walker Jenkinson

Who Lived It

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

PREFACE

NORTH DAKOTA 101

AN ACQUIRED TASTE

SPIRIT OF PLACE ON THE

SO WHO ARE WE NOW?

THE IDENTITY OF NORTH DAKOTA

ON CERTAIN EFFIGIES:

WITH APOLOGIES TO MONTAIGNE

MEDICINE ROCK:

SEEKING THE SACRED IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

WHERE ALPH THE SACRED RIVER RAN:

THE THREAT TO THE LITTLE MISSOURI RIVER

THE HEART OF EVERYTHING THAT IS

CAPITALISM ON CRACK:

EMBRACING THE GIFT HORSE

THE MOSQUE, THE MISSILE, THE MARTYR, THE METHANE—AND THE MASS

THE FUTURE OF NORTH DAKOTA

THE LANGUAGE OF COTTONWOODS

APPENDIX:

RETHINKING OUR RELATIONS WITH NATIVE NORTH DAKOTANS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Foreword

Clay Jenkinson is a public intellectual. He thinks deeply about issues and shares his conclusions widely. In this book he turns his attention—not for the first time—to North Dakota, the state that nurtured him and to which he returned after study at distinguished universities, including Oxford, and teaching, writing and creative work in other places. The enormous emptiness of North Dakota drew him home, and he began to explore anew the state’s grasp on its people, all of its people—lovers of its wilderness, tillers of its soil, drillers for its oil, newcomers, descendants of homesteaders, indigenous people. He turned, too, to the eccentricities of its politics. Nor did he overlook the extremes of the state’s climate, the panorama of its landscape, the voice of its cottonwood trees—the species that surely should be the state’s arboreal emblem, but which North Dakotans overlooked in favor of a more stately, less rangy, and less well-adapted species, the American elm. The choice is in some ways typical of North Dakotans. We have never quite gotten things right, although we’ve been fighting about them for a long time.

The truth about North Dakota is that it attracts attention from outside its borders only in extreme times, like during the extraordinary uprising that produced the Nonpartisan League, the closest any state has ever come to a government of democratic socialists. Democratic Socialists created the nation’s only state-owned bank, an institution to which the state’s current residents (and especially its politicians) pay daily homage, since it has helped balance the state’s budgets, educate its children, expand its farms, build its small towns and mine its resources—in other words, to make the state economically successful, even in the wake of the wreckage of the Great Depression, which struck North Dakota more brutally than almost any other state, causing a dramatic decline in population that took seven decades to overcome. Today, North Dakota gets attention for the stupendous richness of its oil fields and for the rightward lurch of its politics. Less than a decade ago, all members of North Dakota’s congressional delegation were Democrats, all three of them. Today not a single Democrat occupies any statewide or federal office. Not one. And the party has been reduced to a remnant in the state legislature. Only one other state gave Donald Trump a larger victory margin than North Dakota.

Jenkinson seeks the soul of his homeland in this book.

It has been a lifelong search for him, and I am extremely proud to have helped set him on this journey. I met young Jenkinson when he was a student at Dickinson High School in one of North Dakota’s few real cities, population 7,000, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the price of oil mostly, because even then the wide-open, sunbaked and windswept southwestern corner of the state relied on oil for whatever comforts could be created. It was a modest boom and an uncertain one, but it brought open-minded and eager people to the town, including a newspaper editor who’d worked overseas, editing Stars and Stripes, and an oil promoter who settled down as circulation director of The Dickinson Press. And it brought me, a freshly minted cub reporter. Jenkinson latched on to the Press. He was a junior in high school who owned a camera. He got the photographer job at the Press, he teases me, because I couldn’t take pictures.

Those were great days in a great country. Southwestern North Dakota was under-covered. Reporters from bigger papers showed up once in a while, from Bismarck or far-off Fargo, less often from Billings, Montana, or Minneapolis, Minnesota. Once a reporter from New York City passed through. Unbelievable. Otherwise, we had the territory to ourselves, and we set out to discover all that it had in it, the raw and the cooked.

Jenkinson renewed his search when he returned to the state, and he brought an assortment of entrepreneurial ideas. In effect, he monetized his breadth of knowledge in the humanities, creating The Thomas Jefferson Hour, in which he portrayed The Founder addressing fundamental issues of his time and our own. To this he added a kind of travel agency which organized trips to explore all sorts of places: Paris, Rome, Greece, the Panama Canal, California’s Central Valley. He became an important scholar of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of Discovery, of Robert Oppenheimer, of John Steinbeck (the California connection). He established the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University in his hometown.

This is his thirteenth book.

Dig in. Enjoy.

It is an important book about an important place, a deep look into the workings of one of the fifty states, at once a look of concern, bewilderment and wonder, a loving look and a critical one that illuminates the quirkiness of the pride that North Dakotans have in the place and in themselves. For an example, read about the competition for bragging rights as the Geographical Center of North America.

Mike Jacobs

Gilby, North Dakota

Preface

If you are not a North Dakotan, please read this book anyway. It is about a very interesting place, and it could just as well have been written about almost anywhere on the Great Plains. At the very least, it has ramifications for the entire region and, to a certain extent, for all of rural America. There are more uncool places in America than cool. Even states like California and Colorado have their North Dakotas—think of Fresno and Visalia (California), and of Limon and Lamar (Colorado).

If you are a North Dakotan, please read this book through because it is important that we have conversations about our beloved state: its history, its landscape, its identity, its habits of the heart, its future, its spirit of place, its relations with the Native Americans who constitute 6 percent of the population, the fastest growing population in North Dakota. Please don’t be offended by the ironies in several of the essays. We have to have a sense of humor about ourselves to live in such an improbable place.

I love North Dakota with all my heart.

There is no posturing in this book of essays. I have written what I think and feel and see. At this writing, I’m sixty-five years old. I have nothing to lose by telling the truth (the whole truth) as I see it. I don’t pretend I have greater access to the soul of North Dakota than others. But if my fellow North Dakotans don’t recognize themselves in these essays, I will have failed utterly. Nor do I wish to duck issues that are hard for us to talk about. We’ve had an endless number of feel-good calendars and websites and marketing campaigns that try to present North Dakota as something that it is not or is only very occasionally. I love North Dakota warts (blizzards, windstorms, droughts) and all, and I don’t think we can forge a future for this isolated improbable place if we try to convince others and ourselves that this is a kind of rural paradise where meadowlarks sing on every round bale of hay.

Although I have lived elsewhere, I have spent well more than half of my life in North Dakota. When I have lived elsewhere, when people have asked me who I am, I invariably say, I’m a North Dakotan. This gets everyone’s attention. Most people express a little surprise, as if I were saying I am from the Yukon or Outer Mongolia. Aside from being the father of a young woman I love beyond count, my principal allegiance is to North Dakota. There are many places that matter to me greatly that are scattered across America and the globe. But only one speaks to my heart and makes me feel at home. Bury my heart a few miles north of Marmarth, overlooking the sacred Little Missouri River, just below Pretty Butte, and across from the ranch of Linda and Merle Clark.

North Dakota is not an easy place to live. Notice how many older people of means scurry away to Scottsdale, Arizona, or Hemet, California, or Naples, Florida, immediately after Halloween (they stay for the grandchildren) and return only at about Easter. But nobody from Hemet or Palm Springs leaves those places in January to spend a few months in North Dakota.

While I love North Dakota and sing its praises wherever I go, in and out of the state, I find a good deal about my homeland frustrating (I’m sure it’s mutual). If you don’t feel that love on every page of this book, either you are not reading carefully, or I am a bad writer. Or both.

The working title of this book was So Who Are We Now? I knew that would not be the final title, but it encapsulates the purposes of the book. We know who we were—an isolated family farm state that was not glamorous in any way, but we knew our work and our place, and we helped to feed the world. That paradigm has been fraying for the past thirty years as family farms yielded to a kind of unsentimental agribusiness model of food production, as our small towns shrank to the minimal viable cluster of basic services, and as North Dakota became so thoroughly wired to the rest of the world that our distinctive agrarian culture began to blend into the dominant consumer blandness of American life. This book raises the following questions from several different perspectives:

So who are we now?

Can we sustain and conserve the extraordinary character of North Dakota (modesty, neighborliness, practical skillfulness, gumption, good sense, integrity, stoicism, resourcefulness) when the agrarian lifeway that nurtured those values has largely disappeared?

What is our relationship to the land, the rolling hills, the prairie potholes, the bluffs, buttes, and badlands, the swell of the vast and open plains, the endlessness of this lightly populated homeland?

As we find new ways to extract profit from this place, what landscapes, if any, do we wish to preserve, to protect from economic or industrial development?

What will the post-agrarian, and (soon enough) post-carbon future of North Dakota look like?

Who wants to live here and to what purpose?

What is our post-agrarian identity in a place that is not quite Midwest, not quite true West?

What sorts of cultural investments might we make to attract visitors and perhaps new North Dakotans?

How can we make our relationship with Native Americans enrich and improve the lives of all North Dakotans, a source of new creativity, a way forward that blends the best qualities of both cultures to make North Dakota one of the most remarkable places in North America?

I don’t pretend to have answers to these questions. As a humanities scholar, I learned long ago that the questions are more important than the answers. I do have one iron conviction that informs every page of this book. If we North Dakotans think we can just continue to amble along in a kind of habitual, reactive way, making the best of whatever comes, and going about the business of life without consciously engaging in a purposeful statewide conversation (or debate) about who we are, what we want from life, and how we can help North Dakota Be Legendary in America (not just in our marketing campaigns), we would be making the gravest mistake in our history. The greatest and most consequential North Dakotans—Bill Guy, Bill Langer, A.C. Townley, Sitting Bull, Harold Schafer, Art Link—have all given their best energies to envisioning a thriving rural civilization that embodies something unique to this place at the center of America, tucked up along the Canadian border.

And if we disagree, as my hero Thomas Jefferson put it, let us disagree as rational friends.

North Dakota 101

North Dakota is a mid-sized rectangular state snubbed up against the Canadian border at the center of the North American continent. It is the fourth least populous state (after Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming). It is the most treeless state in America. It is the least and last visited state in America.

From an economic point of view, North Dakota is an exporter of food and fuel for the rest of the world. It also grows decent, talented, and hard-working young people for export.

North Dakota is the second coldest state after Alaska, which doesn’t really count. The average annual temperature is forty-two degrees, but any North Dakotan would settle for forty-two degrees on any day between November and April. It is the fourth windiest state (after Nebraska, Kansas, and South Dakota).

North Dakota is about as far from the capitals of power, money, privilege, entertainment, hipness, and celebrity as it is possible to be. In the larger consciousness of America, it is usually entirely overlooked or forgotten, but to the extent that it is recognized at all, it is synonymous with isolation, flyover country, dullsville, clunkiness, and the middle (even the middle of the middle) of nowhere. For most of the second half of the twentieth century North Dakota was the butt of national jokes.

North Dakota’s economy is based on agriculture, energy production, and tourism. There is very little manufacturing. The largest employers in the state are higher education, the K–12 public school system, the energy industry, agriculture and ag-related businesses, and government. Even now, when the family farm paradigm is beginning to implode, one in four North Dakotans is employed in an ag-related enterprise.

North Dakota has the nation’s second or third worst drunk driving problem (DUI). It often leads the nation in binge drinking, including by teenagers. Except for its Native American population, North Dakota would be one of the five least diverse states in America. Whites and Native Americans in North Dakota lead essentially parallel lives with little intersection, except in shopping malls and pow wows. There are five federally recognized Indian reservations in North Dakota: Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara), Spirit Lake (Dakota), Turtle Mountain (Ojibwe), Standing Rock (Lakota), and Lake Traverse (Dakota). Native Americans represent 6 percent of the North Dakota population.

Only 3.9 percent of North Dakota is public land, the rest private. Each of the thirteen states farther west has more public land: Montana 29 percent, Wyoming 48 percent, Colorado 36 percent, even California at 45 percent. North Dakotans regard themselves as rugged individualists, self-reliant, and independent. They complain loudly about the federal government, but the truth is that the state routinely receives more money from the federal treasury than it sends in, and the state could never have been settled or survived without federal subsidization of railroads, homesteads, highways, including interstate highways, military installations, missile bases, the alphabet soup of the New Deal, farm price supports, dams, reclamation projects, conservation reserve programs, below-cost grazing leases, and university research facilities.

North Dakota is the home of Lawrence Welk and Eric Sevareid, Angie Dickinson and Roger Maris, Louis L’Amour and Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark spent more time in North Dakota than in any other state: 213 days. The great Lakota leader Sitting Bull surrendered in northwestern North Dakota on July 19, 1881. North Dakota was the last residence of George Armstrong Custer before he rode into Montana to get himself killed in June 1876. More recently, North Dakota was the boyhood home of the actor Josh Duhamel and the NFL quarterback Carson Wentz.

North Dakota has just one National Park, named for Theodore Roosevelt who lived in the badlands of Dakota Territory for about four years (1883-87) before he became the 26th President of the United States. But it has sixty-three National Wildlife Refuges—more than any other state.

Outsiders will tell you that North Dakota is flat, and some of it is, but most of it is contoured and a little of it rugged. North Dakotans like to speak of rolling hills, coulees and couteaus, bluffs, and buttes. Only the badlands of the western edge of the state are dramatic. One of the world’s great rivers, the Missouri, flows through North Dakota on its way to St. Louis and the Gulf of Mexico, and one of the greatest of its tributaries, the Little Missouri, incises its way magnificently through the southwestern quadrant of the state.

The highest point in North Dakota is 3,506 feet above sea level. It’s known as White Butte, visited by a few hundred people per year. Most establish a base camp at about 2,200 feet and spend a few days acclimatizing themselves for the final ascent. The lowest point is on the Minnesota border on the Red River near Pembina at 750 feet. There are no mountains in North Dakota, but three slight protuberances call themselves mountains: the Killdeer Mountains (buttes) in the west, the Turtle Mountains (knobs) in the north, and the Pembina Mountains (knobs) in the northeast. All of these are lower than White Butte at 3,506.

North Dakota has a population density of eleven people per square mile, compared to Montana with seven per square mile, South Dakota with twelve, and Minnesota with seventy-one. But most of the population of North Dakota lives along the three main traffic corridors. One in four North Dakotans lives in the Red River Valley within ten miles of the Minnesota border (along I-29). The combined population of the towns and cities along I-94, I-29 and US 2 account for a full 60 percent of the state’s population, concentrated in a tiny sliver of the surface area of North Dakota. Most of North Dakota is empty or nearly so, and emptying further, as the rural population gravitates to the cities for the amenities and better access to health care.

As of 2020, North Dakota has 26,100 farms, all family farms in some legal sense of the term. The average farm size is 1,506 acres. Fully 90 percent of the surface area of North Dakota is farmed, 39,300,000 acres. This includes pasturage.

North Dakota produces food for the world. The state ranks number one in production of spring wheat, durum wheat (pasta wheat), dry edible peas, dry edible beans, flaxseed, canola, and honey. It also ranks high in production of potatoes, sugar beets, cattle, sunflowers, and soybeans. The North Dakota farm economy has been revolutionized in the past half-century by crop diversity (the era of King Wheat is over), by the development of drought-resistant strains of corn, soybeans, and sunflowers, by new farming methods that don’t require frequent plowing (no-till agriculture), and by robotics.

North Dakota produces energy. The western part of the state encompasses some of the largest lignite coal beds in America. As of 2016 North Dakota was ranked number two in oil production in the United States, exporting more than a million and a half barrels per day, second only to Texas. North Dakota has hundreds of years of lignite coal reserves. Opinions vary about how much oil underlies the state, but mid-range estimates put it at around twenty billion recoverable barrels. The state’s natural gas reserves are boundless.

North Dakotans have a reputation for being friendly, likeable, law-abiding, decent, hard-working, modest, and above all practical. Physics, not metaphysics. And not just physics, but applied engineering. The people of North Dakota are capable of welding metal, changing oil, weeding a garden, fixing fence, installing drywall, wiring a garage, milking a goat, or butchering a deer. Some of these things are changing pretty fast. They represent the lingering skillset of people who grew up on or have close kin on a family farm.

North Dakota is an acquired taste. Few make the effort. Even many North Dakotans are a little lukewarm about their homeland.

An Acquired Taste

North Dakota is not for the faint of heart. A largely homogenous population, very long and often very rough winters, wind that blows like a sonofabitch, a dearth of high-quality amenities, a meat and potatoes diet (nobody would say cuisine), a seemingly flat and featureless landscape. It’s Applebee’s (if you are lucky) and satellite TV. The hordes of young men and some women who came to take jobs in the Bakken Oil Boom formed a kind of tedious chorus; hard to be outside for much of the calendar year, not much to do on a Friday night except drink or bowl, and (this is where it hurts a bit) the people are, well, nice but dull.

Look at it this way. Couples from all over America move to Colorado or Oregon or New Mexico or California or even Montana, but it is hard to imagine many people sitting over the breakfast table saying, You know what, honey, let’s move to North Dakota! Nobody moves to North Dakota unless it involves a job. Nobody moves to North Dakota for the boutique restaurants, the independent theater, the fly fishing or the mountain hiking. Or for the cultural or ethnic diversity.

So what’s the payoff? Why live in North Dakota?

Those who happen to be born in North Dakota might decide to stay because they have kin in the state, because it’s the path of least resistance, because they like the pace and comfort of North Dakota and aren’t sure they would like the rat race elsewhere. Some stay because they lack the skills and the imagination to leave. But young people, the ones who become National Merit Scholars, who score high on the SATs, often venture off to elite universities in faraway places. They may come back to make their lives in North Dakota—but more often not. Some return after spending several decades elsewhere. And the number one, somewhat defensive, refrain of North Dakota life is, It’s a good place to raise kids. That cannot be enough.

Here’s the case for North Dakota.

First of all, the people of North Dakota are not just nice (in the sense of superficial friendliness) but deeply and authentically nice, generous, respectful, decent, kind, helpful, and polite. And outstanding in a crisis. This is a lingering legacy of our rural agricultural past. If dependability and trust matter to you, North Dakota is possibly the best destination in America.

It’s easier to find a parking space in North Dakota than almost anywhere else. Traffic and congestion are virtually non-existent. In Bismarck, the state capital, the people joke about a rush minute at 5 p.m. It’s true that on a Friday afternoon in the summer you will see a loose but long line of pickups hauling boats and fifth-wheel RVs away from the cities towards the handful of recreation lakes in the state, particularly Lake Sakakawea. (In Fargo and Grand Forks, the exodus is always towards Minnesota lake country.)

There are several especially beautiful, even grand, places in North Dakota: Pembina Gorge in the northeast corner of the state; the lovely Sheyenne River Valley, especially the National Grasslands unit southeast of Valley City; the big Karl Bodmer rolling hills country north and west of Williston; and of course the Little Missouri River badlands. These are excellent places to visit. One problem, though, is that these special places are regarded even by lifelong residents as not really representative of North Dakota.

The badlands, for example, are understood as North Dakota’s Montana, a little out of character for a state otherwise perceived as flat and bland.

Not everyone finds the more general landscape of North Dakota beautiful or even pleasing. This includes many of the 760,000 permanent residents of the state. Only a small minority love North Dakota for its physiognomy. When North Dakotans praise their homeland, it is usually for the culture of decency rather than the prairie potholes, rolling plains, ridgelines, coteaus, and the alluvial Red River Valley. Almost every defense of North Dakota finds its way to a now-semi-mythical family farm—operated by an uncle, a cousin, a friend of a cousin, or a trusted neighbor. North Dakotans are proud of their agrarian heritage, and almost entirely relieved that they have left those chores behind and migrated for a blue- or white-collar destiny in one of North Dakota’s cities.

For those with the patience to see it and willingness to find it, North Dakota is a starkly magnificent place. By Yosemite and Grand Teton standards, there is not much drama in the landscape, but those with eyes to see find a rich palette of tawny pastel colors: rust, charcoal, mauve, golden, brown, yellow, delicate crocus blue, wild prairie rose pink, and the ashen green of yucca. The subtle roll and contouring of the land is an acquired taste. You have to get over the careless habit of tossing it into the conceptual bin of flatland, but once you have acquired that taste you will find heartbreakingly beautiful (and weirdly addictive) the swells and ridges, the buttes and breaks and bluffs, the endless sea of grass stretching to the far horizon, the disconcertingly agreeable sense that you are a small bipedal creature who does not fully belong in the circle of grass and sky that repeats itself a hundred thousand times on the Great Plains. Add a distant thunderstorm inching its way from the western horizon, a lightshow of nearly constant heat lightning that dances high in the sky, with occasional skewers of vicious streak lightning, and the first dawning of the slow rumble of thunder from dozens of miles away. Or a ground blizzard in November while you are driving along a black asphalt road with fading yellow stripes, wondering if you are going to reach your destination. You grip the steering wheel and give yourself a little informal internal prayer that your car doesn’t break down—not now, not today. Or an evening in June when the sun seems reluctant to set at all, lingers in the northwestern sky, and, when it finally slips below the ridge-ragged horizon, illuminates the bottom half of the entire sky all the way around with a subtle pink roseate burnishing, or tangerine, or the color of Bloody Mary mix, all with some streaks of grey and charcoal a few degrees above the horizon. Or that moment when you are out in the middle of nowhere, alone or with a silent friend, and you actually feel the heat of the day drop a full level as if at once, and you become for a moment fully present, alive in every pore, on full alert, and you smile your most natural smile and relax into one of the greatest landscapes on earth. Or that moment on a sandbar in the mighty Missouri River on a ninety-degree afternoon, when you’re flat out in yoga style on your back, eyes closed, for twenty minutes, and you realize, as Thoreau once put it, that you have actually begun to cook. Then you open your eyes and what you see—some trick of the ophthalmological nerve structure—is for half a minute or more a photovoltaic X-ray, or a grayscale landscape. As this moment fills you with wild wonder you realize, This is why we live here . . . it doesn’t get any better than this. Hand me a beer.

It’s such a mistake to live in North Dakota and not do the training exercises that enable you to fall in love with its improbable windswept aesthetics.

And, of course, there is Fargo, poised like a track star on the Minnesota border, leaning east, the state’s largest city, the cultural capital of North Dakota, the one place that does not require some sort of apology as its advocates make the case for its excellence and livability. Fargo would be interesting almost anywhere except in the context of New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Whether it is a North Dakota city now—or a kind of city state of the Upper Midwest—is a point of some contention by lovers of Fargo or North Dakota or both.

If I were the tourism czar for North Dakota, each of the welcome signs along the borders of the state would contain these words and nothing more:

North Dakota: Yeah, We Know.

Clay’s concept of a highway welcome sign. Don’t quit your day job!

Spirit of Place on the Northern Plains

Spirit of place is either something that emanates from the land and into the people who inhabit or visit it, or it is an attitude held by people towards a place. In other words, either the place permeates people with meaning and identity, or people invest a place with meaning because of their historical or personal association with it. When these two types of spirit of place merge, a powerful sense of resonance occurs.

An example of a site on the Great Plains that has spirit of place is the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument on the plains of south central Montana. I know a dozen people who have visited the site over the years who swear there is something eerie going on there that cannot be explained rationally. They say they can feel something—the battle, the ghosts, an energy in the grass, a kind of karma or perhaps lingering historical fallout. My mother (who was not given to the metaphysical) said there is a barely perceptible "sitz sitz sis sis sitz . . . sitz sitz sis sis sitz" she literally heard when she was there coming from the wind in the grass, and that this unaccountable sibilance has some sort of historical or spiritual significance. Listen to the grass, I say. If you live on the Great Plains, always listen to the grass. I know a disillusioned history professor who says that anyone who happens upon the site and walks around will inevitably feel something heightened there. I know a rational preacher who is skeptical of the Apostles’ Creed and the Trinity, but who was visibly moved by the spirit in the grass when he visited the battlefield for the first time. He had been reading about the battle for many years. Words, words, words, says Hamlet.

Now, whether there is really any intrinsic spirit of place at the Little Bighorn battlefield or just meaning we have invested in it because of the amazing terrible thing that happened there on June 25, 1876, is an interesting question. My mother swore that anyone who ventures onto the ridge, someone looking for a Kmart or a place to have a quiet picnic, but with no understanding of what transpired there 145 years ago, would experience some sort of soul’s heightening. Others, a little less certainly, are inclined to agree. I’m not so sure. But I have heard some messages on the wind and whether they came from the land or from my psyche on the land, I regard them as authentic.

An example of the second type of spirit of place is a family’s home place, particularly a rural family. My family’s home place, the site of our penates and lares, is just south of Fergus Falls, Minnesota. My grandparents Dick and Rhoda Straus lived there for forty years. It was a small rolling hills farm of about eighty-five acres, a third of it pasture, and the rest cropland. They milked cows—just sixteen of them, each with a name like Bess or Whitey or Pal—and at times they raised chickens and pigs, and a half dozen steers for the meat market. We no longer own the farm. That’s a long story interesting only to us. But I make the pilgrimage to the home place at least once a year. When I am there, I invariably go into the barn to kick around among the stalls. I can remember which stanchion belonged to which Holstein or Guernsey. I climb up into the hayloft and scramble around a little among what’s left of disintegrating hay bales. The smell of dry hay in a barn loft is one of the greatest and most evocative of all smells. Even after forty years, the hayloft is a slightly eroticized place of mystery to me. The ropes and pulleys designed to lift hay from the ground into the loft have never worked. I always walk the entire perimeter of the farm. I make my annual inspection of my grandmother’s rhubarb plants out along the lilac bushes west of the house. As I sit in the grass next to my grandmother’s big vegetable garden, I loosen my grip on my mind so that the memories and associations can flow. I deplore, mostly on behalf of my mother, the way the new owners have let the place go, particularly the large brick flower planters that flank the front door. My grandmother was exceptionally proud of her chrysanthemums. Except in the winter those planters were never empty. Grandma lavished gentle attention on her flowers as she would in changing a newborn’s diaper. As I walk about on the warm earth of the old family farm, I feel sad and glad and recharged with memory. I feel closer to my roots. I ache for what has been lost: in my life, in my family, in the lifeway of the upper plains and prairie, in rural life, in America. And then I get in my car and drive away.

My mother grew up in that tradition, went away to college and never looked back. She ran away from rural life as if it were a curse, married an urban intellectual who could not really handle a pliers, and scoffed away the idea of baking her own bread or canning her own vegetables. I would probably not be writing this book if she had married a local farmer and slopped hogs. I ache for what she discarded so ruthlessly, and I have hefted my share of hay bales, but I am only fractionally better with a pliers than my father, and I am pretty sure I don’t have the right stuff to be a true agrarian. But the agrarian in me—that tendril of rootedness—is what I prize most in my character.*

Almost everyone has a home place.

Spirit of place, then, is the value added of a site that cannot be measured in economic terms. It is related to the physical landscape, but its significance is metaphysical—or perhaps the physical and metaphysical mated in a kind of irresistible minuet. Ask any person to describe their most important earthly place. For one, it is a terrace on Santorini. For another, it is a coffee shop in Seattle. For a third, it is a calm bay at the base of a calving glacier in the panhandle of Alaska. For most, it is home, or the old home place. Where we go when we have nowhere else to go. Where we go to reconnect. Where nostalgia takes us. The Greeks regarded nostalgia as a disease. νοσταλγία. Perhaps they were right.

We live at a time in human history when place matters less than it ever has before. Almost any American community with a population of more than 5,000 has a Dairy Queen, a Pizza Hut, perhaps a Burger King or McDonald’s. Any place with more than 25,000 people has an Applebee’s and a Walmart. Small towns yearn for Target, bigger ones for Costco. The American people are fond of national and international chain stores and restaurants. There is some sort of a population trigger algorithm that determines who has access to what plateau of amenities—in shopping, in dining, in lodging. Communities measure themselves—they misuse the term quality of life—by how high up the hierarchy of chain store placement they have risen. The difference in the strip of roadside amenities—Honey Baked Ham, NAPA Auto Parts, Barnes and Noble, Panda Express, Toys R Us, and Taco Bell—in Aurora, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago and Aurora, Colorado, a prosperous suburb of Denver—is negligible. It’s sometimes called the geography of nowhere. The French observer Alexis de Tocqueville said (1835) Americans are the freest people on earth and they freely rush to homogenous lifestyles and entertainments.

Thanks to satellite and cable television,